‘Laurent’ captures designer’s fine lines, frayed edges

In the initial moments of Bertrand Bonello’s “Saint Laurent” biopic, the film’s namesake — the late Algerian-born French designer Yves Saint Laurent — checks into a hotel room in Paris in search of solitude and sleep, away from the fame and demands of being one of the preeminent names in ’70s fashion.

Once in his room, Mr. Saint Laurent (Gaspard Ulliel) sits in the shadows on the edge of his bed puffing a cigarette while answering questions for a telephone interview. He speaks of his service more than a decade earlier in the Algerian War — and how it led him to becoming committed and addicted to tranquilizers.

“I had disorders,” he murmurs.

This is the first glimpse of a 150-minute journey into the magnificence and madness of the life of Mr. Saint Laurent, who died in 2008 at age 71. Mr. Bonello isn’t the first to make the man behind

the Mondrian dress and female tuxedo suit the focus of a film.

French director Jalil Lespert also did it recently in his movie “Yves Saint Laurent,” which was produced with insights from the designer’s longtime companion and professional partner Pierre Berge. (Mr. Bonello’s film was backed by Kering, which owns the Saint Laurent brand.) But their approaches to telling his story are very different.

Rather than giving viewers a chronological look at Mr. Saint Laurent from youth to final years, Mr. Bonello homes in on his life from 1967-1976 during what’s arguably the height of his career. Consequently, not much attention is paid to the designer’s time at Dior, and the little we find out about his younger years is mentioned in passing, like during the phone conversation in the hotel room at the start of the film.

As one year passes, another is flashed across the screen in bold to signal the start of the next. This is effective, but the pacing feels unbalanced. Years tick by rather rapidly earlier on in the film but then are dragged out more later on, making the movie longer than it needs to be.

Mr. Bonello does do a nice job of putting Mr. Saint Laurent’s work in perspective with the rest of society. Sometimes scenes of models sashaying through the seasons down the catwalk are juxtaposed with clips of news footage. The movie takes a disjointed turn, however, near the end when it jumps between Mr. Saint Laurent in the mid-1970s and an older version of himself in 1989. It’s unexpected — not in a good way — because it’s unclear why the film has taken this sudden shift without really justifying it or preparing the viewer for it.

For those watching to take in the sights of Mr. Saint Laurent’s prolific designs, sometimes fashion takes a backseat to the orgy of drugs, drinking and sex that feels unnecessary and incessant at times. In one particularly disturbing scene, his beloved French bulldog Moujik comes across some pills and gobbles them up, leaving him slobbering and seizing on the floor while Mr. Saint Laurent and his paramour Jacques De Bascher are passed out on the couch in their own drug-induced stupor. All of this, coupled with the weird back-and-forth time travel as the movie progresses, is enough to leave viewers feeling a little hazy themselves.

Because of (or in spite of) all of this, Mr. Bonello manages to capture the life of an artist: the tenacity, the triumphs, the torments. The film conveys well the grind of churning out collection after collection after collection, all the while being haunted by what the critics will say about the clothes and whether they’ll sell.